Caroline Achaintre’s work is replete with uncertain likenesses; despite multiple levels of abstraction, it’s full of resemblances. Grounded in a trove of images borrowed from pop culture and art history, these chimerical combiÂnations result in unlikely, uncomfortable aesthetic marriages. The references ricochet through a multiplicity of details and overlapping systems, enticing the viewer to mine their deep narratives. Achaintre’s enterprise involves the fabrication of things that are primed with psychological resonances. Elusive and fragmented, her objects are full of artifice and exaggeration, but never obscure; they are constructed from decodable links that make them richly associative. Achaintre’s aesthetic influences mirror the disjunctions that inform her work. She draws eclectically and promiscuously from high art and popular culture, alluding to German Expressionism, postwar British sculpture, primitivism, cartoons, ethnographic and anthropological museum displays, tribal art, books of outdated fashion, the European carnival tradition, Tetris, and postmodern design. …see the entire article in the print version of November’s Sculpture magazine.
